The present invention generally relates to cleaning apparatus, and more particularly to a cleaning apparatus which cleans a photoconductive belt used in an electrophotographic recording system such as a photocopier, a printer, a facsimile or the like.
A conventional recording system having a construction as shown in FIG. 1, generally has a photoconductive belt 20 including a photoconductive surface, a plurality of supporting rollers 21 for supporting and driving the photoconductive belt 20, a charging part 22, a toner developer 23, an image transfer part 24, a charge removal lamp 25, a belt cleaning apparatus 26, and a pair of fixing rollers 27. FIG. 2 shows in greater detail a construction of this conventional belt cleaning apparatus of the type as shown in FIG. 1. In FIG. 2, the conventional belt cleaning apparatus generally has a toner container 28 for storing unused toner from the photoconductive belt 20, a supporting member 29 having an oscillating movement due to a force applied by a spring 30 to the supporting member 29, a cleaning blade 31 being secured to the supporting member 29 and brought in contact with a surface of the photoconductive belt 20, a rotatable toner collecting member 32, a fixed toner collecting blade 33 coaxially supported with the rotatable toner collecting member 32, and a toner 34.
In FIGS. 1 and 2, the photoconductive belt 20 is rotated anticlockwise while being supported by the supporting rollers 21 during operation of the recording system. The photoconductive belt 20 is electrostatically charged by the charger 22, and the photoconductive belt 20 is exposed to light from a light source at an exposure position C, as indicated in FIG. 1, to form a latent image of recording information on a surface of the photoconductive belt 20 at this position. This latent image formed on the photoconductive belt surface is then developed with toner by the toner developer 23, and the image is transferred to a recording paper by the image transfer part 24. And, the image on the recording paper is fixed by the fixing rollers 27, thereby carrying out an image recording by the recording system. After the image transfer is performed by the image transfer part 24, a residual toner which has been unused for image recording still remains on the photoconductive belt surface, which is removed by the cleaning blade 31 of the belt cleaning apparatus 26. And, the residual toner is accumulated within the toner container 28, and the residual toner entering the toner container 28 is conventionally collected only by means of the rotatable toner collecting member 32 and the toner collecting blade 33 secured onto the toner collecting member 32 so that the residual toner is collected in the toner container 28. In this manner, the photoconductive belt 20 of the recording system is cleaned by removing the residual toner by the cleaning apparatus as described above.
However., when the recording system is used continuously for a long period of time, the toner, paper chips powder are gradually accumulated in a space between the photoconductive belt 20 and the cleaning blade 31, and in some cases a few laminations S, as shown in FIG. 3, may be produced in the space, and in the other cases the cleaning blade 31 which usually has a planar shape may partially be broken. Such laminations S and a broken part of the cleaning blade 31 may often cause a cleaning problem. Due to the laminations S, the cleaning blade 31 may slightly be lifted undesirably. The laminations S themselves may partially be broken because they are very brittle, a partial opening may be formed in the laminations S. Due to such openings of the laminations S, or the broken part of the cleaning blade 31, a portion P of the residual toner, as shown in FIG. 3, sometimes remains on the surface of the photoconductive belt 20 without being removed by the belt cleaning apparatus 26, thereby causing a problem such as a recorded paper showing a defective image including undesired vertical stripes appearing on the recorded paper.